Of Bells and Gold
by clueless1234
Summary: The golden swell of dusk transforms Tokyo's busy streets into a wonderland of nostalgia.
A golden swell of dusk transforms Tokyo's busy streets into a liminal realm in which, just for a delicate ephermeral moment, the poignancy of nostalgia can mollify present strifes.

The crisp dusk air, minute particles of suspended debris kindled by the waning sun into effervescent sprites, smells of reminiscence, of caramel apple stands by the road after school, of the hazy silhouettes of balls sent flying against a darkening horizon, of bubble baths and ice cream trucks hovering at the fringes of one's memory. Idyllic innocence. A tender moment in which the mechanistic banality of the city is imbued with a breath of fairy-tale enigma, the frenetic scurrying stride of its inhabitants adopting a lightness, furrowed brows and wrinkles relaxing in a subconscious concession of equanimity.

The distant swell of dusk illuminates the busy Tokyo streets, its gentle fringes painting the city with a splattering of melancholy. Apologetic, perhaps - a compensatory effort for the Light that the world will soon be deprived. An exquisite mottled backdrop not only to the historic ending of a dynasty but also that of a regal spirit representing one of the crowning achievements of evolution's most successful project known as humanity.

Clutching his ruined left arm, Light Yagami staggers through the familiar streets. Across the horizon, the waning sun continues to sink, its fading light straining to caress the dying man one final time. Disheveled, bloodied, desperate - not the insensate dumbstruck fear of a cornered animal, but the remorse of a noble soul facing an necessary sacrifice - Light is nevertheless stunning, no less beautiful than he had been at the peak of his success. No, this is Light's most magnificent moment yet, the manic Kira crimson in his eyes replaced by a revelation gained from having gazed down death's abyss and still retaining the fortitude to persist. Pushing forward with labored dignity, Light's final procession - a soon-to-be aborted soul's last attempt to exude half a lifetime's worth of vitality into its last few precious moment - puts the dusk to shame in its beauty.

Although Light has recovered an sufficient modicum of mental clarity to suppress the staggering pain from his bullet wounds, the increasing blurriness of his vision and darkening skyline in the distance gently remind him that time is limited. Each step accompanied by an agonized gasp of pain and enervation, Light hears himself sobbing softly - he is retracing the route home when he first picked up the Death Note five years ago. In an surreal collision of dimensions, Light sees his younger self by the railway guard, wholly immersed in his finding. His listless sixteen-year-old self, still blissfully ignorant of the power and curse that will consume him. Doggedly struggling onward, Light watches in petrified wonder as the boy approaches, eyes still buried in the Note and oblivious to his surroundings - so bright and promising, so innocent to the evil that will irrevocably seal his fate. If he knew the outcome, would he still have regarded notebook with such awe? Silently, anticlimactically, their paths coincide and diverge, the boy passing by his tortured future self without glancing up. From his vantage, Light is struck by the hideousness of the notebook, wholly incompatible with the upstanding young man whose future, up until its appearance, promised unprecedented glory. Light does not look back, but had he not been paralyzed by pain he would have grabbed the his younger self by the shoulders and shake until the boy acquiesced to pitching the notebook into a hole into Earth's very burning core. Perhaps in another parallel universe, it would have made a difference. Yet Light recognizes defeat; having long blasted past the point of no return, he understands that this ending has long been carved into fate's tablet by a divine lapidary, and whether with dignity or cowardice, he must confront it.

He resolves to not spend the dwindling minutes of his life being senselessly pursued.

An abandoned patch of warehouses - not dissimilar to the one that just witnessed his humiliation - looms before him, ominous against an expiring sun, the fading horizon's sobering violet highlighting its dilapidation. Will this be his resting place? Had there been just one bullet wound less, Light would have chuckled - after all, he is not above irony.

Why did he do it? Matsuda's question was incisive for once. What was all of this for? A pathetic, lonely death on a sordid stairwell, mutilated, undignified, defeated. The fiery momentum of his imperial crusade, combined pressure from L, the task force and his admittedly childish obstinacy to win, rendered the question of his motives irrelevant. L's death had been a sobering revelation of death's indiscriminate immediacy - the world's best (and also second and third best) detective, who once wielded its most powerful police agencies like a conductor's baton, buried in an nondescript, humble grave like any other ordinary man. His vast fortunes now useful only for securing a high-quality coffin that nonetheless cannot endure nature's corrosive force. Power and prestige are inconsequential in death. However demure L's funeral had been, in the back of his psyche Light had anticipated that his own would be even more pitiful. For once, he wishes, in futility, that his prediction had been erraneous.

Why did he persist? Why, when pushed to murder his own sister and manipulate his father, did he not set the notebook aflame and live the rest of his life in blissful ignorance? Why did he resume Kira's dominion without a second thought after recovering the notebook, when he could have begun anew?

Unlike L, whose eccentricities and ragged appearance would repulse more than impress the public eye, Light - whose genius is complemented by looks and charm - would have no need for anonymity. He would have been idolized by the media, the subject of documentaries and textbooks as a real-life reincarnation of Holmes, a rival of minds like Tessla and Hawking, an emblematic household name for justice and virtue. Indeed, he could have achieved a concomitant due of fame as Kira, although founded, this time, on admiration rather than fear.

Yet stumbling down the alleyway, a vermilion trail of his life force soon to be the only evidence of his existence, Light perceives the immensity of his failure and waste. Having eschewed the doorway of glory which was all but custom-fitted to his frame, he chose a shortcut into the proverbial sinister woods where, despite his disdain for a foe of such platitude, that he nonetheless was seduced by the siren of Power.

Ryuk had warned Light of the Death Note's curse, yet Light was too intoxicated by its power to heed the caution. The notebook was too compatible with and timely for his ambitions to be a random stroke of serendipity - finally his intellect and righteousness could be channeled into a worthy cause. Who else but Light Yagami could have carried such an impossible mission into its world-scale present day fruition - an empire spanning and uniting the entire world as none have before.

Having rocket-launched himself into a grisly campaign for justice and empowerment, Light experienced a level of success so staggering, an ascent to divine stature so accelerated, that the question of his pedestal's soundness has always been irrelevant. Now that nothing remains of it aside from the metallic taste of blood and nauseating waves of pain, Light experiences, in a vivid moment of internal revelation, the shattering of his mirage of grandeur, its solar-system's worth of fragments reflecting, thousand-fold, his emaciated true self - the bright-eyed youth who had unstintingly thrown himself into L's investigation, who had wholeheartedly believed in Kira's evil, who had refused manipulation and deceit for the sake of the case - breaking from its shackles at long last. All along, he had not been god but a hubristic architect who wasted his generous allotment of resources on an impossible Tower of Babel rather than the ziggurat for which he was commissioned.

An excruciating stab of remorse temporarily supersedes his physical distress.

Unable to suppress the gasp of pain accompanying each labored step, Light sobs at his tragedy. A prodigy dying a broken, forsaken man for his valiant but misguided efforts toward a noble ideal. A tragic hero in his last moment, contrite not for failure but for his unstinting devotion, down to the spare tire's bare treads, to a fantasy.

Dusk has been displaced by the muted violet of impending twilight, by wistful bids of farewell in the playground, by elongating shadows trailing diminishing silhouettes. Light has slowed to a limp, dragging one stiff wounded leg, on the verge of collapse with each hesitant step. The pain has become more nuanced, mollifed from a singular insensate wave of agony into disparate throbs synchronized with his heartbeat. Synaptic dampening, concomitant withthe overall decline of his system, has rendered his thoughts sluggish and incoherent.

What now?

Yesterday, Light would have mounted a fearsome resistance - staunch the bleeding, find Misa, who would gladly sacrifice her life for him. The Death Note is certainly not the only way to kill. Assuming the Task Force is above the hypocrisy of using the notebook themselves, resurgence is not impossible. A fitting recompense for the egregious incompetence of men who would allow a bullet-ridden Kira - _Kira_ \- to escape. Yet perhaps due to the blood loss and aftershock of humiliation, or perhaps the bullets' merciless trail have finally informed Light of his fragility, Light feels positively radiant with placid indifference. He have fought for too hard for too long - a long-deserved rest at last.

Slowing to saunter, Light wanders onward into the labyrinth of industrial decay, grimy walls casting angular shadows reminiscent of a Giorgio di Chirico painting. His shadow encounters the damp cool of an entrance, and he peers overhead to take note of skeletal steel beams groaning under the weight of rusted walls. Dust mixes with blood underfoot as Light dimly realizes - better inside and sheltered than out in the elements. Each step generates a clang that ricochets interminably within the barren warehouse.

Light had no illusions about dying in the warm company of family and friends, but he also never envisioned it to be so lonely.

Dimly, a staircase materializes before his path. Illuminated by windows - two of the few in the building - it provides a welcome sanctuary of radiance in the industrial wasteland. Light streams from the window above, flickering and fluttering like newly-hatched butterfly wings.

Scaling the staircase is out of the question - this will be his final resting place.

Settling himself in as dignified a position as possible (who knows how long it will take authorities to discover his body in this cartographer's nightmare of a junkyard), Light relishes the warmth of the sun's withdrawing fringes. Searing pain has given away to a dull discomfort - pain is a caveat after all, and his body has recognized the futility of such reminder in its final moments.

Twilight has settled against Light's awareness. Peering up at a sliver of sky through the overhead window, light swimming before his vision as if through water, Light marvels at the circularity of it all. Five years ago, he was in this exact position - in his humble beginnings at the bottom of the social staircase, restless with a brilliance without expenditure - when he stumbled upon an alternative escalator that promised to deliver him to unprecedented heights. It was this allure of a shortcut - of the overnight realization of his potential - that blinded Light to the skewing of his destination. Five years and a lifetime's worth of regret later, he has returned to his starting point at the bottom of a staircase, but this time drained of the means to scale it. The same listless genius, but this time fatally debilitated and ruined.

Why did he continue? After relinquishing the Death Note and losing his memories, Light had reverted to the To-Oh prodigy with an assiduous sense of justice, whose deductive prowess and clairvoyance rivals, even surpasses, that of L. More importantly - upright, kind, unduplicitous. When Light swiveled L's chair around and solemnly sked if the detective thought he would be capable of mass murder, he was not motivated by theatrical affectation but genuine moral effrontery. Was that the true Light? What happened to this Light upon his recovery of the notebook, when the sudden elephant stampede of memories assaulted his mind like an elephant stampede and rendered that horrible scream - of triumph? Or remorse? Where was this Light to protest when he made the flash-second decision to carve Higuchi's name into the note with his own blood? Had he restrained his competitive verve that hollered victory at any cost, had he paused just once to consider the inflation of his ego, would he have reined in the demon-possessed horse that was drawing his carriage to the brink?

The horizon has darkened to a deep rouge with a singular, mottled streak of lavendar like a bruise on the face of heaven. Stretching toward the moon's gradual debut, a solitary tower soars above the industrial wasteland that would be Light Yagami's final resting place. A Shinigami perches listlessly at its apex and, with a casual stroke of pen, changes history's course.

The throb in Light's heart is more surprising than painful - the Task Force? Near? Perhaps Ryuk. Regardless, his time is up, and it is almost poetically apt that the Death Note is to execute the inevitable.

Sixty seconds to breathe his last, the metabolic waste from his lungs his final marks on a world that remains oblivious to his sacrifice. Across the river, defying the horizon's attempt to support its swollen weight above the sky, the sun begins its submergence under the water, placid ripples glowing a muted orange like a field of fireflies at the conclusion of summer. Placated by twilight's lovely display, Light feels his eyelids grow heavy, his heartbeat slowing as a cool numbness spreads from his core. Vaguely, he becomes aware of another presence, ethereal, obscured by the iridescent beams of light streaming down the window. A mane of disheveled hair illuminated into a cobalt storm betrays a familiar presence

Although Mello and Near were directly responsible for his defeat, Light have always regarded L as his sole nemesis. They are similar in too many ways - behind their facades as agents of justice both are ultimately motivated by a simple matter of ego, a heedless desire for the thrill of the chase, intellects vastly exceeding a society dominated by mediocrity, whose primary fuel is none other than boredom. A peculiar connection was forged by their dalliances - a begrudging acknowledgement that fed their obsession with one another. The detective died in Light's arms; it is fitting that he should reciprocate the favor with his spectral company now. Whether a figment of his mind or an legitimate spiritual being, Light is grateful for the lack of mirth on L's face (in stark contrast to his own in L's final moments). No, L is as stoic as Light remembers - there is no triumph to such immense waste of genius, to the collapse of a majestic delusion erected their enormous mutual expense.

On the day of L's death, the detective reported hearing phantom bell chimes from the orphanage that birthed his career. Light had been unmoved - his impervious focus stems partly from his ability to transcend the sentimental attachments that humanity invest into inconsequential material goods- personal keepsakes, childhood bedrooms, and goodness forbid, another fellow human being. Countless examples of great historical men have demonstrated that such attachments invariably reneges to orchestrate their downfall, like a spider caught in its own web.

Yet as Light struggles to perceive beyond the encroaching darkness, his eyes closing gradually but with finality, he hears the distant echo of a somber Latin chorus. When his father took him to Frankfurt decades ago, Light - a child though he were - had not plunged into the bustling flea markets like the other children, but was instead drawn to the towering cathedral along the city's remote outskirts. Craning his head as high as his vertebral column would allow, Light had stared, open-mouthed and gaping, at the elegance of the pointed arches soaring into the heavens, the breathtaking resplendence of the stained-glass windows, the sobering grandeur of the establishment's dimensions. Yet the Latin choir that was rehearsing by the altar, in the distant end of the nave, remained his most ineffaceable impression of the establishment. Solemn lento harmony had ricocheted against the stone walls, amplified thousand-fold and viscerally powerful, almost as if emanating interiorly from Light's soul itself. The tune was not mellifluous, a mournful drawl that languished long after the source of the sound terminated. Yet it was ineffably moving - an divine melody that transcended the pettiness of human struggles, soaring into a higher realm that both humbled of one's insignificance and awed with a promise that the visible is only the epidermis of a greater reality.

Transported back to a younger self in a vertiginous wave of nostalgic, Light listened in stupefied awe as the melody re-emerged from some depths in his soul, gentle but steadily building in volume and momentum, its lush, unrelenting dissonance elevating his tormented spirit from its broken vessel into a new unknown. His eyes drifts shut definitively as the melody strikes its last chord - an interminable, uncompromising and mighty tidal wave sweeping Light into the ether and away, his consciousness ebbing just as the sun withdraws its final opalescent hem and sinks beyond the horizon.

Night sweeps over earth with its cloak of indigo, darkness expanding in a gradient, from a translucent sapphire at the skyline still bearing the sun's vestigial fuchsia to the stratospheric-most span of void broken only by faint sparkle of distant stars . A pervasive darkness defied only by the tranquil lambency of an emerging crescent moon.


End file.
